The approved budget for Nakuru County in FY 2021/22 is Ksh. 23.25 billion out of which Ksh. 10.57 billion is for development and Ksh. 12.67 billion is allocated towards recurrent expenditures.
Nakuru County expects to receive Ksh. 13.03 billion from the national treasury as the equitable share of revenue raised nationally. It also aims to collect Ksh. 3 billion from own sources of revenues such as single business permits, cess, rents and parking fees among others.
Nakuru had a cash balance of Ksh. 5.7 billion from FY 2020/2021. The county also expects to receive Ksh. 1.4 billion as conditional grants.
How did Nakuru County perform in Q1?
Nakuru County received Ksh. 1.95 billion as equitable share of the revenue raised nationally, from their own sources they were able to raise Ksh. 815 million and received Ksh. 194.9 million as conditional grants. The county had a cash balance of Ksh. 5.7 billion.
The total funds available for budget implementation during Q1 was Ksh. 8.66 billion.
During Q1 of the FY 2021/2022, the Office of Controller of Budget approved the withdrawal of Ksh. 1.89 billion from the County Revenue Fund (CRF) account.
Expenditure
Nakuru County spent a total of Ksh. 1.53 billion on recurrent programmes during Q1. This was 80.9 percent of the total funds released by the Office of Control of Budget.
Pending Bills
The outstanding pending bills as at 30th June 2021 amounted to Ksh. 17 million. Most counties have huge pending bills with Nairobi City County on the lead. This issue has had a huge negative impact on suppliers and vendors leaving some of them unable to continue being in business.
As at the beginning of 2021/2022, the county government of Nakuru had prepared a payment plan to settle the entire bills with the financial year. However, during the Q1 the county did not report any payment towards paying the pending bills.
The county government of Nakuru spent 93.5 percent of their expenditure in Q1 on compensation of employees. We agree that employees must be paid, but the county should have also done more on development side.
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Under operations and maintenance, the largest expenditure item during Q1 was Ksh. 18.56 million on sitting allowances for Members of County Assembly followed by Ksh. 18.09 million on superannuation fund or gratuity the others were domestic travel at Ksh. 1.32 million. This shows that Nakuru was not very keep on domestic and foreign travel as per the report from the office of controller of budget.
Development Expenditure
Nakuru County did not spend even a penny on development during first quarter of FY 2021/2022. The controller of budget notes that this may have been occasioned by the late approval of the county budget which happened on 18th August, 2021.
An analysis of expenditure by department shows that the Department for Lands, Physical Planning and Housing had the highest percentage of recurrent expenditure to budget at 15.7 percent and Nakuru Municipality had the lowest expenditure at 3.7 percent.
Across all county departments, Personnel had the highest absorption. There was little expenditure elsewhere.
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